Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's 1977 Peugeot 504 has received a bid worth US$1 million after the car was put on an international auction Saturday, state media reported. Iran's official IRNA news agency quoted Ahmad Esfandiari, the head of Iran's Welfare Organization, as saying the bid had come from an Arab country.

According to AFP, the Iranian leader has launched a website (www.ahmadinejad-car.com) to invite international bids for his car, with the proceeds to fund a project to build 60,000 homes for the disabled and to needy women. The website will accept bids for a period of one month, the report said.

Ahmadinejad is proud to present himself as the "friend of the poor." After his election to his first term as president in 2005, he was required by law to make an asset declaration and he listed a then 40-year-old 175-square-metre house in a lower-middle class part of east Tehran, the contents of two bank accounts and the ageing white Peugeot.